Public Chemistry Consortium

10 leading academic groups and 7 leading SMEs

The European Lead Factory has world-class chemistry assets in place, designed to facilitate the successful development of a Public Compound Collection of around 200,000 novel compounds. This new public collection will complement the existing EFPIA compound collection, together creating the 500,000-strong Joint European Compound Library (JECL).

Academic partners

The EU Lead Factory project brings together 13 leading European academic groups and institutions, with proven expertise in biological chemistry and library design. They have published some of the most influential papers internationally on topics including:

productive navigation of biologically-relevant chemical space

innovative design of compound libraries with a high hit rate in screening assays

discovery and application of high quality chemical probes to elucidate biological mechanisms

synthetic approaches that enable the systematic exploration of chemical space.

Publications

Contributions from academic partners have been cited over 38,000 times, with a median H index of ~23 (Web of Science, May 2012), and all have publications that currently rank in the top percentile of their field (Essential Science Indicators, July 2010). Many of their outputs that are directly relevant to this project have been published recently, confirming the quality of expertise on offer within innovative library design and synthesis. Since January 2009, various partners have published 176 papers on the following:

cheminformatic approaches (18 papers)

novel scaffold synthesis (95 papers)

novel methods for scaffold decoration (8 papers)

bioactive ligand discovery (56 papers)​

Overall, partners have collectively published over 1700 papers.

SME partners

Seven of Europe’s most successful small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the field of contract chemistry services are participating, helping to translate innovative design ideas into industry‐standard compound libraries. They have very significant essential capabilities and capacity, with 350 employees in total and cutting edge lab facilities. This means they can synthesise the required numbers of compounds to an industrial specification within tight time frames and budgets.

Project management is also a priority and the chemistry groups are using the unique TarosGate® software suite, designed to enable factory-scale compound management and production. TarosGate allows efficient real-time management of the entire workflow, from inception as a potential library design proposal through to delivery of physical compounds to the Joint European Compound Library.

Above all, crowdsourcing is a central EU Lead Factory tenet, and the chemistry assets have been selected to maximise library diversity and novelty by giving all chemistry contributors the most direct possible path to successful synthesis. After a secure and simple submission and acceptance of your library design, you will benefit from the laboratory resources, scientific collaboration and project oversight needed to develop successful library designs.

Interested?

Contact the programme office to know more how you can interact with the European Lead Factory

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The research leading to these results has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n' 115489, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 / 2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution.